By Eugenio Murrali and Francesca Merlo
A breach of light in the darkness. A work of creation that conceals even as it reveals, inviting those who encounter it to search more deeply. Created by Chinese artist Pan Daijing, the second chapter of the Dicastery for Culture and Education’s Reading, Again series – once again curated by Donatien Grau for Conciliazione 5, an exhibition space in Rome – is not a work that simply presents itself. Instead, it gradually unfolds through the active participation of the viewer.
Presenting the artist and her work on the evening of Jul 2 in the St Pius X Hall, Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, Prefect of the Dicastery, said Daijing’s installation “asks each of us to remain present, to allow ourselves to be touched” by our emotions.
For the Cardinal, it offers “an extraordinarily original” way of approaching reading – not as “the rapid decoding of signs, but as a profoundly human experience: an act that engages the ears before the eyes, the body before the intellect, and waiting before understanding.”
It is not simply about understanding, he said, but about inhabiting, about learning to dwell. Quoting Pope Leo XIV, he added: “We have the urgent duty to remain profoundly human, lovingly safeguarding the magnificent humanity that has been entrusted to us.”
Finding silence
The small but precious exhibition space, which opens directly onto the street and is visible at all times to passers-by, is more than a gallery. It becomes a book in itself – one into which visitors are invited to immerse not only their eyes, but also their minds and souls.
“I think it’s an attempt – or perhaps an invitation – to remain curious about ourselves,” Daijing said.
Her work invites people to cross a threshold.
“It is about reading, reflection, thresholds, about seeing places we normally cannot access,” she explained. “Not because we lack the ability, but perhaps because the world has simply become too noisy.”
For Daijing, it is essential to “find silence within ourselves.”
Yet silence, she insists, “doesn’t mean stillness. It also means movement and growth.” Within that space, “we can be honest – or at least try to be honest – with our feelings and our dreams.”
Her artistic practice is an ongoing attempt to engage with the different layers of reality through an experience that is constantly evolving.
“That’s also why I make art,” she said. “Through creating, I gain access to understanding, awareness, consciousness, and a deeper knowledge of myself.”
The allegory of the cave
“It is both beautiful and challenging,” Cardinal Tolentino de Mendonça said, “that Pan has transformed the Conciliazione 5 gallery into a cave—the archetypal place where perception is tested.”
The Cardinal recalled Plato’s cave as an allegory of knowledge: a journey out of confinement towards a deeper and truer reality.
He then turned to St Augustine, who in Book Ten of the Confessions describes the cave as memory.
Rather than a place of ignorance, it becomes an archive of the soul – a living storehouse each person carries within as both a resource and a possibility.
Reflecting further on Daijing’s work, the Cardinal said that “Pan Daijing’s artistic language is never simply about conveying information. It is a place where darkness itself becomes a means of knowledge – a cave that we inhabit fully until, like Augustine’s memory, it becomes a living interior space.”
A covenant with the gaze
The result of Daijing’s long and rigorous artistic process is not explanatory art weighed down by interpretation. Instead, it is “a covenant with our gaze” – one that requires trust and “an intelligence that does not seek to display itself, but places itself at the service of what must happen between one gaze and another.”
The Cardinal also praised both the artist and the curator for having “the courage not to explain everything,” as well as “the wisdom not to impose meaning, and the generosity to leave those who look, listen or read the freedom to journey consciously through their own inner landscape.”
An exploration of life
Daijing’s artistic practice brings together visual art, music, sound, film and performance.
“Her work,” curator Donatien Grau observed, “embraces many artistic forms without ever being confined by any of them. I would even say that Pan’s art is art itself. It is life lived as artistic practice, as research, as process, as destiny. Her journey has been one of continual self-discovery and discovery of the world – an exploration of life as a metaphysical structure.”
Through sculpture, video and sound, always in dialogue with architecture and space, Daijing’s work creates an encounter between the public and the deeply personal.
The gallery – or rather its window onto the street – is open to everyone. Yet to truly ‘read’ what lies within, one must first recognise it, allow oneself to be drawn in, choose to step through the surrounding darkness, and awaken one’s own gaze – both outward and inward – to meet that of the artist through layers of reflection and mise en abyme.
In his introduction, Grau quoted Marcel Proust, who wrote: “Every reader, while reading, is reading himself.”
“In Pan Daijing’s work,” Grau explained, “that journey inward becomes a bridge towards our shared humanity.”
“The author is not dead, as Roland Barthes famously claimed,” he concluded. “But neither is the author alone anymore. Hers is a gaze turned towards us, towards the street, towards life.”
The artist as a filter
During the conversation between Grau and Daijing before the opening of the exhibition, another theme emerged: reading as an intricate way of relating first to ourselves and then to the world.
“I believe reading is much more than engaging with literature,” Daijing said. “It also means reading thoughts, reading silence, reading the impossibility of understanding – and recognising what that makes us feel. It means entering into relationship with a world that is full of things we are either afraid to understand or simply unable to understand.”
The discussion also explored the idea of the artist as a filter.
Asked about this image, Daijing replied:
“I do feel like a filter. At this stage of the process, I don’t really know what kind of filter I am, because that isn’t up to me. What matters is remaining still, remaining present, staying with those things that, beyond what the ears can hear, eventually emerge somewhere in the body. It might be in the heart. It might be in the gut. My role as a filter is to present that – to distil it from every moment I spend immersed in this experience. And that is true of almost everything I do as an artist.” – Vatican News
